This blog runs parallel to a new poetry blog 'Poetry Pinfold' (poetrypinfold.blogspot.com), and a new blog with poems in Dutch (bartnooteboomgedichten.blogspot.com)

Saturday, March 31, 2018

363. The causality of concepts

In preceding items in this blog I adopted ideas from
‘object-oriented ontology’ (3O). An object has an inside, of components that
cohere in some way, with a certain endurance in time and across conditions, and
it has an outside, where it has effects and from which it draws influence.

In the dynamics of change of objects, in the
interaction between what ‘is in them’ and what ‘they are in’, for interactions
in which humans are involved I use the multiple causality of Aristotle, with
its efficient cause (actors), final cause (goals), material cause (things
used), formal cause (method, knowledge, theory, technology), conditional cause
(circumstances), and exemplary cause (such as role models).

Are concepts, universals, abstractions objects?
Platonic ideas are eternal and identical across contexts. Do they have
components? For universals, presumably the components would be its particulars.
What is their coherence? One might say: by an essence of the universal, but I
don’t believe in such essences. The particulars have overlapping connotations.
New particulars can arise, and they may shift the universal, in a shift of
connotations, which raises some doubt about its endurance. For an example I
used the case where someone used a stuffed cow for a chair.

Concepts do take part in causality. They produce
effects. They can act as an efficient cause: playing a role in an argument. As
a final cause, a goal: a concept to be analysed. As a material cause: the stuff
of discourse. Formal: the method of investigation. Conditional: effects from
the educational system, symbolic order/ideology. Exemplary: act as a paradigm.

According to Harman events are also objects. He gives
the example of a collision between two airplanes. First there are two objects:
the planes. Then a third object: the collision. Then a fourth object: the
consequences of the crash. That seems odd. Yet there may be some argument for
it. It does satisfy the criterion for an object of having components, with
coherence in the form of succession in a causal process. But the coherence is
hardly stable.

Take a stumble on the stairs. What are its
components’? The initial loss of balance, bumps along the hobbling down, the
final smack on the floor, the sprained ankle and a broken arm? What is their
coherence? Stages in a process of causality? How stable is that coherence?

The crux of an object is (relative) stability of
composition. It does allow for change at some ‘lower’ level, of the components,
but not their structure. For example, a body that stays the same while changing
its cells.

By contrast, the crux of an event is change, of the
structure of an object (its ‘inside’) or of its relation to its ‘environment’
(movement, metabolism, effects, phenomenology). A train is a coherent object
that moves in space.

Acts are also events, and in them actors can create
objects, demolish them and affect them even while they retain their identity.
If I say something to someone, and he/she understands and learns from it,
he/she is affected while staying the same person. So, here again, there must be
a way of affecting objects while they retain their identity, and for that I
employ the notion of a script, as described in the preceding item in this blog.

Is a book an object, as 3O claims, or only a node in a
network of sense, as Foucault claimed? I can be both at the same time, like an
object as a node in a script as an object. But the network of meanings in books
seems tenuous, as an object. What is the coherence of sense? Two books will
share many words, but if sense varies with the context, those words have many
different meanings across books. They do share grammar, within a language.
Coherence will increase in a genre of books, or as an item in the oeuvre of a
specific author. But the coherence within a book is much stronger: in spatial
continuity (the book), coherence in a plot, continuity of characters, or line
of argument, lettertype, font size, paper, authorship, readership, publisher,
bookshop/website, reviews.

Is Alice wonderland an object? I think she is. What
are her components and the coherence between them? They are not empirical. To
investigate them you have to ask the author, who is likely to say that whatever
is not mentioned in the book you would have to imagine yourself. Could she
appear in a book as a cosmonaut?Perhaps. As a sausage? Hardly. Outside relations are with other
characters in the book, the red Queen, for example, who tells her that you have
to run to stand still. Coherence in fiction might be logical, though that does
not always apply, not in the Snark, for example, who is probably hunted precisely
to dodge logic. Whether it ‘works’ is a literary or dramatic matter, judged by
critics. It has real effects, such as a reader buying the book, or being spired
to write one him/herself.

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Poems posted on Poetrypinfold.blogspot.comComing down (a memory of Genevaa) NightYin and YangPoetry pinfoldSiëstaDown and out in the mindThe stream bears light (the Nasrid palace at the Alhambra)From one to many Sunday in GoudaOn the canalStanzas of stone (San Gimignano, torre grosso)The words have a ballNo rocket scienceMontreuxNew roomGenerationsSister (Paris)MotherMother 2Blessed solitudeCivil servantAdolescent lamentThe streamTender rip-offNight 2BirdsAtlas unmovedSeminar on KrakmaroDiplomacyDepositionWinter train in ThuringenSarajevoFar aheadHat trick on the canalFlowers of deathOn a camping one night

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